Building An Effective Inside Sales Strategy: Leveraging HubSpot Part 2

Inside sales have long occupied a pivotal role for B2B business growth, but as companies face the growing need to prioritize flexibility, remote work, and contactless interactions, inside sales have taken on a renewed significance. In our last article, we began an exploration of the vast capabilities that HubSpot offers to inside sales teams seeking a powerful, integrated platform to organize and automate many aspects of their process. Features like filtered views, sales tasks, and queues, HubSpot calling, automatic integration with third-party tools, the workflow tool, and HubSpot deals provide structure and streamlining for increased productivity and ease of workflow.

In this article, we’ll dive into a few more of the benefits offered by this versatile platform and available to B2B business owners to customize to their inside sales team’s needs.

Email Templates and Sequences

Every business has a certain set of emails that they tend to use repeatedly. Usually tied to some point in the client journey or to a specific campaign, these emails can reside in HubSpot as customizable, dynamic templates that your inside sales team can quickly select and deploy. The power of the platform enables it to intelligently cull data from client records and histories so that the templates are automatically populated with client-specific information like contact name, company name, and more.

Beyond the usefulness of individual templates, emails can be grouped together into automated sequences so that clients and prospects receive a targeted and strategically timed series of communications. Contacts can be enrolled in a sequence manually, or their enrollment can be triggered by an action, like signing up for a webinar. Once enrolled in a sequence, contacts continue to receive the emails in the series as you have designated over time, and are only removed when they reply to one of the emails, call, or book a meeting.

These nurture sequences can include introductory emails, videos, follow-up emails, and other engaging content. Sequences can even be integrated with your sales team’s workflow, so that there is a trigger, for example, for a team member to make a phone call in between emails.

Because they are structured and automated, email templates and sequences create a process that optimizes your likelihood of getting a response and ensures that no opportunity to follow up and engage with a contact falls through the cracks.

HubSpot Meetings

If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of emailing back and forth to schedule a meeting, then you know the power of a good scheduling tool. HubSpot meetings offer that scheduling capability, but its true power lies in the fact that it is integrated directly into your CRM and your sales automation platform.

With HubSpot meetings, your inside sales team is able to create links to multiple types of meetings, each with customized timeframes and availability options. When a contact books a meeting, a series of actions are set in motion. For example, a contact booking a discovery call can automatically generate a deal record, import all of the necessary data into the deal record, place it on the forecast, schedule the meeting, and send the invitation to all parties.

When B2B business owners pair HubSpot Sales Professional with an online meeting platform like Zoom, the automation goes even further to generate and send the Zoom meeting link.

HubSpot Documents

HubSpot documents is a powerful and versatile tool that allows your inside sales team to bypass the time and limitations of sending individual PDFs to contacts and instead invite them to read and interact with a dynamic version of your content within a customized viewing frame inside HubSpot.

Inside sales team members have the ability to add calls to action and embed URLs into documents, elevating them from passively viewed individual pieces of content to one integrated and interactive experience. Contacts can view a table of contents, access multiple pages with one click, download documents, share them, and even book meetings and send reply emails from them. And because all of this is happening within the HubSpot environment, your sales team has access to valuable insights including whether or not the document was opened, how much time was spent in it, and what specific pages were viewed.

Playbooks

Playbooks is an advanced tool that enables you to create notes, suggested scripts, and guidance for your inside sales team that appears at key points in the system to provide support for team members as they complete tasks like phone calls.

Multiple playbooks can be created to act as an inline training and support tool for various types of interactions. You may have one playbook for discovery calls, another for introductory calls, and still others for additional points in your inside sales process. Each playbook might contain some sample scripted language, or even a series of questions you want your team members to be sure are answered in that particular type of call. You can also set up your playbooks in the form of interactive checklists where sales team members can record the answers contacts give, and have these answers automatically added to the record.

It’s easy to see that features like email templates and sequences, HubSpot meetings, documents, and playbooks are designed to drastically cut time spent on repetitive tasks, replacing them with intelligent automation and easy access to relevant data. The end result is an inside sales team whose time and energy are freed up to focus on what is most productive — generating leads and acquiring new business.

In our next and final installment of this series, we’ll round out our exploration of HubSpot with a few more powerful tools for integration and automation. To maximize your inside sales team’s potential, consult with a business growth strategist whose expertise includes transforming your B2B sales process with the power of HubSpot’s integrated platform.

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